Fitness Business School – The Enemy of Your Success

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about what might be the greatest enemy of your potential success. We’ve got a lot to unpack here, so let’s get to it.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

So I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it this way, but sometimes I think of the things that we do or the things that may stand in our way as allies and enemies, people or tactics or strategies that, that help us move towards our goals or things that might potentially stand in our way. Well, if I think about what might be the biggest enemy of your potential greatness of your potential success and not just being average, not being ordinary, or maybe even worse, it’s losing focus. It’s not having the ability to, to stay focused on the things that are priorities. It’s not being able to, to really keep the blinders on when there are a multitude of distractions around us, when there are things that are clamoring for our attention, pulling us in this way or that way, whether it be on social media or whether it be the news or anything else that’s happening in the world, that’s taking your, your focus off the things that you deem most important.

So when I think about this in my business and your business, because in all honesty, my business is very much like your business. There are really kind of two businesses under one roof. There is the client care business and there’s the client attraction business. And so many of us get into this field because we’re excited about the client care business. We like serving people. We like helping people. We like coaching. I know that’s what pulled me into this. Honestly, when I left the world of being a college baseball coach in college strength coach, it’s like, man, there are only a handful of things I really like, and nobody’s going to pay me to watch college football or watch college baseball or whatever else. I mean, I, so I need to find something that I can build around that I really like. And so that client care working with people in the gym, starting my first couple of training businesses and seeing that snowball over time, that was something that really was attractive to me and helped move forward very quickly. And you know, I think a lot of us understand and appreciate the client care business that we’re in.

Now, the challenge that we faced over the last year or so is client care has changed certain things that may have been afterthoughts in the past have been magnified over the past year. Things like the way that you serve somebody when they’re not in your facility, it might have been, you know, the, the second or third or fourth priority for you are now priority. Number one, because that plays a much bigger part in the relationship that you have with clients, things like having live streaming workouts or on demand workouts or accountability or fostering connections between workouts. All those things are more important than they were before, but still client care is one of the two businesses that we have.

And then the second is client attraction, which admittedly for a lot of people in our industry is something that they’ve kind of backed themselves into. They didn’t get into this wanting to be in the marketing and selling side of fitness. They wanted to just have people to serve. They didn’t want to have to go get people to serve. Now for me, I probably came at this from maybe a more fortunate outside perspective because to, to be successful as a college baseball coach, I needed to recruit. So I was always in the player attraction business, as well as player development business. So with player attraction, there was a very simple process. I needed to go out and identify somebody who I felt like could help our program. So I identified my target market just like you do. I reached out to them and gauge their interest and ask them, Hey, will you fill out this prospect card? Will you fill out this this form indicate an interest over time. That became an online form a lot of the time, but in the beginning it was, Hey, here’s a, here’s a paper, fill it out, send it back. And if they indicated an interest that was like opting in, and then there was follow up in the quest to get somebody on campus. And that function just like my daily email, follow up it either. If you’re listening to this podcast that you see very regularly and getting people on campus was getting somebody on a sales call or getting somebody to come in for a trial. And then we decide if it’s a fit to move forward together.

So my client attraction process was already in place, and honestly I just transplanted it to the business world. I transplanted it to my first couple of training businesses, refined it, optimized it, and honestly have been using it and teaching it for the past 16 years since. So all of us, when it comes to maintaining focus, need to have those two kind of businesses under one roof, and we need, we need to keep the blinders on and not get distracted by everything else going on to not use that as an excuse to waste time or not use that as an excuse to struggle and just accept that, Hey, things are going to be slow. No, now’s the time more than ever to, to really focus and hone in on what your core approach to client care and client attraction looks like. So it’s probably beyond the scope of this episode to talk about both in detail.

So I’m just going to give you a simple kind of framework for your core approach to client attraction that you can focus on. And I’ll just tell you what I would do. If I were opening a facility right now, I would borrow the, the, the two core things that have worked for me the best online and offline. And it would be a, a two-fold approach.

The first is a lead magnet to a one-time offer to follow up with consistent offers over time. So let me unpack that for you. So lead magnet, so many of you are familiar with, I give away copies of my books like traditionally, but there are other things that you could give away that somebody may say, Hey, that’s valuable. That’s interesting to me, it could be a gift card for a hundred dollars worth of your services. It could be a book that you’ve written a guide that you’ve created a video series. Heck if you’ve been doing on demand workouts or live workouts and you’ve recorded them, it could be one of your workouts and say, Hey, here’s an anytime, anywhere a workout you can do to look great and get in shape at home. And so you’re giving away something that your target market potentially value, they opt in one time offer could be, is simple, it is just saying, Hey, would you like to come in and try out what we do for a month for whatever rate it is okay for you, or maybe it’s a free trial to come in for seven days or to do your online program for seven or 14 days, or your one-time offer could be as simple as, Hey, let’s get on the phone and do a success.

And then after that, there’s consistent follow up. When I talk with my clients, it is a minimum of three times a week, emails that either you’re sending text in the email or you’re routing them to a different platform that you’ve committed to. So you may have come across this podcast because my email directly did you do an episode of the podcast and that could work for videos that you do on Facebook, for things that you do on Instagram. So either way your sending somebody content in a way that allows you to educate and motivate them and build a relationship over time, and then you’re choosing the format, your best suited to connect with them. You’re, you’re choosing to use maybe a social media platform that you’re riding them towards, or you can just send stuff via text the way that, you know, a lot of times we’ll coach our clients to do, and we’ll give them all the emails that they’re going to send out in a given month, and they can edit them and adapt them to fit their personality and their business and their target market. But that consistency over time has to be part of the core approach. And then you weave in offers week after week, whether it’s a PS on an email or a direct offer, inviting somebody to participate in something that you’re doing, or a deadline-driven offer that, you know, incentivizes somebody to, to go ahead and make a decision to start working with you now. So that would be one, one leg of my core approach to client attraction.

The second would be what I call a client multiplication. And it’s as simple as consistently engaging with my clients and creating ways for them to help me connect with new. And that could be asking them to invite people in, to experience what we do. It could be giving them things like gifts, cards to share with other people. It could be asking them to share the things that that I’m doing on social media or the lead magnets that I’m giving away on their social media feed, or it can be saying, Hey, would you be willing to do a review for me or do a testimonial? So other people that encounter you are more inclined to be interested in doing business with you. And those two would be the, the lifeblood of any business that I have. And those two, in my opinion, are, are timeless. They’re going to be effective for you five years from now, 10 years from now, just like they were five or 10 years ago.

Now, are there other things that we can layer on? Sure. But don’t get distracted by shiny objects. Don’t get to a point where you’re losing focus. Like I alluded to until you have these in place and you’re consistent with them. If you have this foundation, if you maintain focus, you’re going to be in a much stronger position than 95% of the industry that doesn’t do that really 90% of the population that doesn’t do that. So when you’re thinking about how do I improve my business, it’s not going to be a magic bullet. It’s not going to be some kind of incredibly unique thing that, that you stumbled across the, that just transforms the way that you operate in almost any case. What it is going to be is focusing on the things that work being consistent and really being better than we are today. And seeing that 1% improvement daily in these two core areas of business, client attraction, and client care do that. And you you’ll see results.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. And before you go, I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a fitness business owner, they almost always ask me, “How can I get more leads or how can I get more clients?” Well, I have an exclusive offer for you and it’s going to help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive Fitness Lead Academy for six full weeks for just a dollar. Fitness Lead Academy is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and coaching to attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients. Imagine having three marketing emails written for you each and every week for easy-to-deploy promotions provided to you that are proven to convert and they’re ready to use and proven ads and social media posts given to you each and every month as well. Plus you have access to three weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your brand to navigating things like building funnels and getting ads approved. You get all of this and more when you join Fitness Lead Academy. And to prove that FLA can serve you as your virtual marketing department and not only save you plenty of time, but also consistently bring you more leads and clients, you can get access to the entire coaching program for six full weeks. Again, for just $1. If it delivers for you in the way that I expect it will, you can continue on for just $199 a month. So basically, just one additional client each month and you’re ROI positive. And I’m sure that if you apply what we give you, you’re going to get more than just one additional client each month. And you’re going to likely save at least 10 hours a month to take advantage of this special offer. Just go to TestDriveFLA.com to try it out for six full weeks. If it’s not what you’re looking for, you can cancel it any time.

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